Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Politics as Unusual: Washington, DC Hardcore Punk 1979-1983 and the Politics of Sound
    (2015) Maskell, Shayna; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    During the creative and influential years between 1979 and 1983, hardcore punk was not only born -- a mutated sonic stepchild of rock n' roll, British and American punk -- but also evolved into a uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore bands like Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Minor Threat, State of Alert, Government Issue and Faith a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums between all five bands in a mere five years, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. This project considers two major components of this music: aesthetics and the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. By examining the way music communicates -- facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume and dissonance -- while simultaneously incorporating an analysis of hardcore's social context -- including the history of music's cultural canons, as well as the specific socioeconomic, racial and gendered milieu in which music is generated, communicated and responded to --this dissertation attempts to understand how hardcore punk conveys messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class and gender. In doing so, this project looks at how DC hardcore (re)contextualizes and (re)imagines the social and political meanings created by and from sound.
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    The Metaphysics and Ethics of Copyright
    (2008-04-14) Hick, Darren Hudson; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Copyright, broadly defined, is a legal form of proprietary ownership of authored works, including literary, pictorial, musical, and selected other intellectual kinds. Ideally, one who is familiar with the law should know whether something they have created is protected by copyright (and to what extent), and whether some action they take will infringe a copyright. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Rather, established copyright law gives rise to a host of problems, including legal decisions and established doctrines that are alternatively arbitrary, counterintuitive, and contradictory. My central argument is that these problems arise from a failure in copyright law to recognize the nature of its objects, authored works, and that a coherent and stable approach to copyright must be built upon such an understanding. To this end, I outline an ontology of authored works suitable for grounding both the legal and ethical domains of copyright. Centrally, I contend, a reasonable understanding of copyright depends on grasping four composite dimensions of authored works: their atomic dimension--the parts of which they are composed, and the selection and arrangement of these parts; their causal dimension--their contexts of creation and instantiation, and the weak and strong historical links that connect a given work to others; their abstract dimension--that all such works are best understood as type/token entities capable of multiple instantiation; and their categorial dimension--that multiple works belonging to mutually-exclusive categories can be embodied in the same physical object. On an understanding of these factors, I establish conditions for the copyrightability of authored works, for the infringement of these copyrights, and for the creation of "derivative works." Finally, I consider the right of copyright. First showing how the strongest contenders for grounding this right--the Lockean and Constitutional approaches--fail to align with our understanding of authored works, I sketch an alternative approach--one based on the author's creativity as realized in the authored work--building on the ontological account outlined above, and for establishing the extent of this right, including its duration and when it might be infringed without amounting to a violation of the right.
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    "'I SPEAK OF FIERCELY CONTESTED THINGS:'" WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, DEMOCRACY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF A "USABLE PAST"
    (2004-11-17) Jessar, Kevin L; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: "'I SPEAK OF FIERCELY CONTESTED THINGS:'" WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, DEMOCRACY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF A "USABLE PAST" Kevin L. Jessar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004. Dissertation Directed By: Professor Elizabeth B. Loizeaux, Department of English Exploring Williams in relation to progressive historians and literary critics of the 1910s and 1920s, this study places the poet in debates on modernist poetics, social change, and the uses of history, and builds on outstanding work of recent critics who explore Williams' writing as a defense of democratic principles in an illiberal age. Williams' "poem including history" furthered a progressive social agenda by moving beyond the economic determinism of his progressive peers to a kind of emotional determinism, what I call an "affective economics." Williams historicized adaptation and an affective stance of extreme receptivity to the "moment," as his vision of the "usable past." There was no period of uncorrupted grace but only the ever-continuing necessity of adapting to the present moment, the often-feminized "primary." Where Eliot envisioned the "present moment of the past," Williams espied a repeating impregnating moment of "contact" and "touch" -- an historical, ever-recurring present. Democratic renewal and contact with the primary were reinforced by the ability of individuals to decide for themselves without "intermediate authority," to respond to their moment. Williams' stylistics in Paterson and In the American Grain encoded a democratic ethos by compelling readers to exercise individual prerogative jeopardized by corporate power, fascism, and communism. His aesthetic animated the subject position of reader and writer, making the reader write his or her own imaginative history, based, paradoxically, on inhabiting the subject position of representative figures of the past and of the poet himself as they confronted the primary and a secondary culture that would suppress it. Williams thus structured a "participatory aesthetic" to engage the reader in the historical dialectic of "contact" and fearful "withdrawal." In Paterson this dialectic was particularly refracted through fearful, dissonant encounters with contemporary female figures orienting us back to the "primary." Believing writers were a "passionate regenerative force" for society, Williams hoped his "new line[s]" would create "new mind[s]." He wanted to release "personality," the "personal" element, that writers of imaginative histories argued was endangered in a distinctly anti-liberal age and make readers define for themselves a relation to the primary through a "usable past."
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    Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives
    (2004-05-10) Giovannelli, Alessandro; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy
    The <i>ethical criticism of art</i> has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of <i>narratives</i>. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of <i>response</i>, specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives (Chapters 1-2); then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument in support of such a practice (Chapters 3-7). Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noël Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between <i>central</i> and <i>acentral</i> imagining, and <i>iconic</i> and <i>non-iconic</i> imagination. Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into <i>autonomism</i> and <i>moralism</i>, <i>radical</i> and <i>moderate</i>. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for (i) their <i>consequences</i> on their perceivers and (ii) the <i>means of their production</i>, and indicates the evaluation in terms of (iii) the <i>ethical perspective</i> a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic (or "fitting") representation of reality.